of re-building a nation
Ousting Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was the easiest part of the U.S.-led intervention in that country, agreed three faculty panelists during an April 24 University teach-in on the subject "Nation-Building: Premises and Prospects."
The panelists -- Nicholas Sambanis, James C. Scott and Ivo Banac -- said that building peace in Iraq and reconstructing the country as a nation following the war will be a far more difficult process, if it is even possible in the near future.
The discussion, held in Luce Hall, was part of the series of teach-ins on the Iraqi war organized John Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, and Cynthia Farrar, professor (adjunct) of political science and director of urban academic initiatives in Yale's Office of New Haven and State Affairs. Farrar moderated this event.
Sambanis, an assistant professor of political science and associate director of United Nations Studies, pointed out that there are essentially three "nations" in Iraq -- represented by the Sunni and Shiite religious sects and the ethnic Kurds -- and said it is likely there will be a civil war there within the next five years.
Iraq's ethnically diverse populations, religious polarization, history of violent conflict and its oil-dependent economy are all factors that contribute to the likelihood of civil war in the country, and dim its prospects for building a successful democracy, Sambanis told the audience.
"The more the factions and the more unreconciled the factions involved, the harder it is to get an agreement on how to proceed [after the war] and the harder it is to get an agreement," Sambanis commented.
The only institution that has designed "peaceful transitions" in nations following armed conflict is the United Nations, according to Sambanis, adding that the U.N. is, however, "the institution [the Bush] administration is cutting out of the process."
Without the assistance of the United Nations, which he said would have to be targeted "at the right institutions at the right time and in the right order," Sambanis asserted that "we are looking at very likely disaster [in Iraq]."
James Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science, agreed that the odds for a successful democratic transition in Iraq are "extremely long."
He noted that Iraq's institutions and social structures, formed along the lines of "clans, lineages and religious confraternities, are profoundly undemocratic to begin with," and said creating a democratic government there would "contradict" those structures.
Scott maintained that the bigger question, however, is whether the United States is genuinely concerned with rebuilding Iraq as a democratic nation.
While post-World War II Japan and Italy are often cited as "exemplars" of successful democratic nation-building, Scott said, in those cases, there was an insistence that "left-wing parties be excluded from any say in the post-war order." The democratic institutions created in these nations were essentially "an alliance with conservative elites" which "knowingly crushed left-wing parties and crushed strikes, thereby creating hegemonic conservative parties that were absolutely corrupt to their very core," he asserted.
"I assume we want a stable Iraq," Scott told the audience. "But do we want a democratic, and therefore unpredictable, Saudi Arabia or Egypt? I don't believe so. It seems to me that whenever the result of a democratic process thereafter produces a political order that seems directly against our interests, we decide to choose the interest, rather than the institutional form."
Banac, the Bradford Durfee Professor of History, described "nation-building" as a "fancy term that covers enormous trauma of transition from pre-modern hierarchical states to modern states that are democratically constituted and frequently built on concepts of ethnicity. ...
"The idea of a democratically constituted Iraq will have to be more complicated than what this morning's [New York] Times described as 'Islamic democracy,' which is not exactly a clear concept," said Banac.
Any nation-building in Iraq might have to be achieved by redrawing its current borders, he asserted. "If one wishes to preserve the current borders ... then the principle of organization internally is extremely difficult to impose from above by the imperial power of the United States," he said. "It will involve a certain measure of agreement among constituents of religious groups and nationalities that would essentially abolish religious affiliation and ethnicity as a measure of participation. ...
"In fact, the war is going to be the simplest part" of nation-builiding in Iraq, he concluded. "The defeat of the Saddam regime was not an issue for serious observers. But what happens afterward -- what forces are provoked as a result of the intervention -- that is where the real problem is going to rest."
-- By Susan Gonzalez
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